Pod Save America - “Trump’s Fauci fetish.”

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Joe Manchin says he’s voting against the For the People Act, Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail to target Dr. Fauci, and a new Democratic analysis of 2020 offers the party advice on message and organization ahead of the midterms. Then journalist Kara Swisher talks to Jon Lovett about Facebook’s decision to ban Trump for two years.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Levitt. I'm Tommy Vitor. On the pod today, Joe Manchin says he's voting against democracy reform. Donald Trump inches closer to a Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On the pod today, Joe Manchin says he's voting against democracy reform, Donald Trump inches closer to a second run, and the most in-depth democratic analysis of the 2020 election yet offers the party some advice on message and organization heading into the midterms. Then, Lovett talks to the great Kara Swisher about Facebook's announcement that it's keeping Trump off their platform for two more years. But first, our friends at Keep It are celebrating pride with a full month of LGBT guests,

including writer John Paul Bramer, musician Rostam, writer Brandon Taylor, and comedian Sam Jay. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I don't know about you two, but I was having a great weekend until I woke up Sunday morning to a piece written by the most powerful Joe in America with the headline, Why I'm Voting Against the For the People Act. If you all haven't read it, I'll save you the trouble. The only reason the Democratic Senator Manchin gives for opposing the most sweeping democracy reform since the civil rights era is that, quote, this more than 800 page bill has garnered zero Republican support. That's right. Manchin is killing the bill because the same Republican

party that's actively making it harder to vote doesn't support legislation that would make it easier to vote. Manchin also reiterated that he will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster, a statement he was later asked about by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Here's a clip. If you were to keep the idea that maybe you would vote to kill the filibuster, wouldn't that give Republicans an incentive to actually negotiate? Because old Joe Manchin's out there and who knows what he's going to do by taking it off the table. Haven't you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists? I don't think so, because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences. I believe there's a lot more of

my Republican colleagues and friends that feel the same way. I'm just hoping they are able to rise to the occasion to defend our country and support our country. Lovett, how awesome is Joe Manchin's reasoning on both H.R.1 and the filibuster? It's obviously we need to engage the arguments that Joe Manchin is making on the merits. It is obviously, I think, valuable for it to be ripped to shreds by smart people to make a kind of high level intellectual argument against what Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are doing. But like, there's something that has been striking about the past couple of weeks specifically about this, which is Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, they are asked about this constantly, they can, they don't really engage with the arguments against their position,

they make sort of specious defenses of bipartisanship in the gauziest of ways. And I think it's because we need to stop thinking that they're making an argument and realize that what they are doing is creating an identity. They identify as bipartisan. And we see this in our politics all over the place. We see it when climate change because identity, when Donald Trump makes masks and identity,

like turning politics into identity makes everything harder, but they have made bipartisanship and identity. And so I increasingly how I see it is we need to find a way to respect. We need to argue inside of their worldview in a way that makes them feel that they're upholding their bipartisan identity because the truth has not really broken through because they see themselves a certain way and it's not rational. not really broken through because they see themselves a certain way and it's not rational. Tommy, Lovett has an opinion there that is not quite reflected on Twitter. I've seen people suggest that Biden, Schumer and the Democrats should get tough on Manchin, strip him of his committee chairmanships, threaten him with the primary challenge. What do you think about all

that? So I'm going to choose to be a little more optimistic, right? So I'm going to cut this question in half, separate out the filibuster part, because that's going to choose to be a little more optimistic, right? So I'm going to cut this question in half, separate out the filibuster part, because that's going to lead me to a nihilistic despair and just focus on HR1. His response is infuriating because he refuses to specifically engage on what parts of HR1 he does or does not like. And that's annoying because I think it is fair to be critical of H.R. 1. You could argue that it's too sweeping, like he seems to do, and that a version that didn't include creating new ethics rules for the Supreme Court or whatever could be stripped

out, right? But when we can't hear him engage on the substance, we don't know how to come back at him to find a bill that is more narrow and that he will support. So when people say, we need to get tougher on Joe Manchin, I don't totally know what that means. I mean, John, you and I have a different, I think, opinion on Joe Manchin's motivation here. I go into this assuming he's a politician. He likes being an elected official, even if at times he hates being a US senator, as he's been known to sort of ruminate out loud to his colleagues about quitting and running for the governorship of West Virginia. So I assume he's just like trying to keep his options open and only talk about things that he thinks West Virginia voters would like. So I just don't see like pressure from the left on this front being as effective as, one, I think basic grassroots

organizing in West Virginia is good and important and people should do that. But then two, I think Schumer is going to have to work with his caucus to figure out, okay, what's a narrower version of S-1 that could actually pass and that does tackle the sort of specific buckets that you talked about with Stacey Abrams last week. I mean, H.R. 1 is a big, great, sweeping, comprehensive bill, but there's a narrower version of it that I think we could all be really happy with. It's just that Joe Manchin won't tell us if that's what he wants. And then there's the filibuster issue, which is separate. Yeah, I agree with that. I think whether you believe that he is sort of fetishizing bipartisanship as an identity like Lovett does,

or whether you think he's just in it to be reelected again or mostly in it to be reelected again like you do. I sort of think the effect of all of that is the same, whatever his motivation may be. So like we can all call him names all we want on Twitter. It might make us feel great. I don't think that will be very effective. I don't think threatening him with a primary challenge in West Virginia will scare him very much. In fact, he has said before, if you want to do that, I welcome that. It'll make me look better in West Virginia. Please bring it on. So he's certainly not scared of that.

A state where Joe Biden got, what, 30 percent of the vote? Yeah, I think 68, 69. Yeah, go for it. Primary in West Virginia. See how that works. I think that if Democrats stripped him of his committee chairmanship, the next thing that would happen is that Mitch McConnell would call up Joe Manchin and say, hey, I'll give you your chairmanship back if you switch parties and give Republicans the Senate majority. And why wouldn't Manchin take that deal?

And then some people are like, oh, well, it doesn't matter if he's not he's basically Republican anyway. We lose Joe Manchin and Schumer's not the majority leader anymore. We don't confirm any judges ever. Joe Biden has 20 judges on deck. A lot of them are progressive, diverse, great judges. Schumer just asked him to nominate two judges to the circuit court who were voting rights specialists, right? We don't get those. We don't get any economic plan. We get nothing. Joe Biden gets no more nominations.

We get nothing if Joe Manchin is a Republican. So just keep that in mind. Manchin's incoherence has applied to other bills as well. Like Jonathan Shait pointed out that on infrastructure, he has alternatively demanded that the bill be huge, that it be fully paid for, that it obtain Republican support, which are all difficult in their own right, but also collectively impossible because none of those people agree on all of those things, right? So it's like he just is incoherent in his criticisms of all the policies that we are talking about or that he says he supports. I totally agree with that. It's like his arguments are just pretty dumb. And I think we should be open to the possibility that the guy just makes some dumb arguments that he believes. That's the Favreau position. The Favreau position

is he believes stupid stuff sincerely. My position is sort of maximal cynicism. He's keeping all his options open by just kind of being obtuse. Honestly, I think there's I think there's like a fusion between those two, which is that like he makes pretty dumb arguments. But the one thing he thinks about is the only way I'm getting elected in West Virginia is if I look bipartisan all the time, no matter what, which leads him to dumb arguments. Yes, I think that's right. I think that like all of these things feed each other. You know, like I, it is impossible to get a man to believe something.

His livelihood depends on not believing. He sees a lot of interest in being seen as a bipartisan thorn in the left side. That said, like you look at somebody like Sinema, it is not clear that she is doing what is in her political interest right now. She is, you know, her state is, the people who sent her to the Senate are extremely frustrated. She is not where her

more popular Democratic colleague is, Mark Kelly. So like, I do think with Sinema, there is a mix of kind of a gut political instinct around triangulation, plus some like genuine bro minds that they've taken to be true. And it's obviously deeply unsatisfying to approach it from a place of trying to persuade them inside of their own convoluted, messy, incoherent logic. But I don't know what else to do. I don't know what else we're supposed to do. But it does argue that the one thing it does argue for is sort of what they're heading towards, which is show these filibuster holdouts a bunch of broadly popular, what should be bipartisan bills fail. And that's what they're planning to do. So I don't

know. Yeah, I would say the question is like, what to do now? I would suggest, look, first of all, I think there's a bunch of shitty options. I don't think there's a silver bullet here. I think if there was, we would, someone in power would have pursued it by now. I think that the best play here is like an inside outside strategy. I would sort of keep up the outside pressure on Manchin through marches and protests and office visits like, you know, the Poor People's Campaign led by Reverend Barber is holding a march in West Virginia. The NAACP and a bunch of civil rights leaders are meeting with Manchin this week. I think that's good. And then in terms of the inside game, love it, like you were saying, if I were Biden and Schumer, I'd basically start calling Manchin's bluff, right?

First, hold a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which Manchin supports, and then prove on the floor of the Senate, Schumer should prove that Lisa Murkowski is the only Republican who will support it. And then once that goes down, and of course, Joe Manchin said over the weekend, oh, God help us if we can't agree on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Well, great. Let's throw it on the floor and see what happens. See if you get your 10 Republicans. Maybe God can help us. Maybe God can help us. Maybe that's the solution. And then if that fails, I think Biden should publicly invite Joe Manchin to come to the White House with the 10 Republican senators he believes

are most likely to vote for a bipartisan election reform bill that would have three major elements, protect the right to vote, prevent elections from being overturned by one party, which H.R. 1 doesn't even do right now. And I was talking to Stacey and everyone's about on Thursday and a bill and prevent partisan gerrymandering. Right. And then ask them, you guys write the bill, bring me a bill that can get 10 Republicans and, you know, make Joe Manchin own the outcome. Make him responsible for achieving the bipartisanship that he hopes for. Sounds like we got a beer summit. Sorry, moonshine summit.

Moonshine summit. Moonshine summit at the White House. Let's sketch this bill out. We can do this. I like the moonshine summit. He's apparently been known to give moonshine to people who come to his office. Maybe we just get him drunk enough. He also he also apparently has lovely little shindigs on the almost heaven, his houseboat in which he resides in D.C. The name is almost heaven. And honestly, great name. I think I support it. Perfect name for a houseboat for a center from West Virginia. A plus on the naming of the houseboat. Virginia, A plus on the naming of the House vote. But one piece of this, it's like, yeah, let's all right, let's all let's go through that great motion. Like there's two possibilities.

They don't find a compromise. Most likely they do. It doesn't do nearly enough. Why? Because there's a contradiction at the core of this, which is Republicans don't want to pass a bill that makes it harder for Republicans to win elections. The Voting Rights Act was severely limited by the John Roberts courts, what, seven or eight years ago. At this point, we've been trying to pass something ever since a bunch of Republicans have seen that it has been good for them to not have the oversight of the Justice Department in a bunch of these states on their election laws. So it's like you're going to get it. Of course. So so it's like when Republicans are in a partisan way in states across the country, restricting the right to vote to the benefit of Republican politicians.

Any compromise that doesn't fundamentally alter that dynamic is useless. The Venn diagrams don't they don't know they don't go together. They don't overlap. Right. I totally agree with that. But Joe Manchin thinks he's the hero of his own story. So publicly embarrass him by proving that his that the story he's imagining in his head is not going to come to pass. No, I'm with you.

Like I said, I'm with you. I still I still think you don't get anywhere, but I think there are a few more steps to play out here before this is over. He's winning his own Truman Show. I mean, what's so annoying is that like the ideas that we really are talking about, automatic or same day voter registration, vote by mail, independent redistricting, those are actually bipartisan ideas. Those are actually things that would benefit both sides in a lot of ways and that people can support. What's happening in states is the exact opposite. It is gerrymandered legislatures passing laws that are designed to hurt the Democratic Party specifically by making it harder for black and brown people to vote.

And Joe Manchin just won't engage with that reality. He just pretends it doesn't exist and just, you know, defaults to some bromide about bipartisanship. So. Yeah. And I think I think we're going to have to start planning for a world in which we don't have, you know, H.R. 1 passing or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act even. And we figure out a way to overcome a lot of these voter restrictions like we've done in the past. This isn't the first time Republicans have thrown up voter restrictions with a lot of money and organizing. But you can potentially overcome that. I do worry even more about more than the voting restrictions. I worry about the gerrymandering with redistricting coming up and Republicans just winning the House purely by drawing new maps. And then I worry about election subversion, which H.R. 1 doesn't address

and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act doesn't address. There's very little policy. There's very little policy addressing what happens when legislatures or local governments decide to overturn elections. It's because it's a it's we need some. We have someone should do some fucking soon, you know, and like and that again, that's where that should be. In theory, you know, Joe Manchin's seven brave Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump and voted for the commission should want to stop elections of version two because they were against, you know, the decertification of the election. But we'll see. All right. So while Joe Manchin is making it easier for Republicans to steal the next election, we got the guy who lost the last one just waiting in the wings. Donald Trump's blog may be gone and his Facebook ban was just extended for two years. But over the last few weeks, he has cemented his status as the front

runner for the 2024 Republican nomination. Here he is in a fundraising video sent out by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. I want to thank everybody for the tremendous support you've shown. We're going to take back the Senate, take back the House. We're going to take back the White House. And sooner than you think, it's going to be really something special. Sooner than you think. And here he is at the North Carolina Republican Convention on Saturday night, still telling Republican voters that the 2020 election was illegitimate. That election will go down as the crime of the century and our country is being destroyed by people who perhaps have no right to destroy it. They use COVID and they use the mail in ballots to steal an election. It was the third world country election like we've never seen

before. I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy. I'm the one that's trying to save it. Please remember that. So sadly, sadly, we do have to begin here by debunking a dangerous conspiracy that was spreading on social media after the speech. Donald Trump did not have his pants on backwards, despite some fairly horrendous jokes from resistance Twitter accounts about a video close up of Trump's pants that has over eight million views and led to the trending hashtag Trump pants. Creative. Yeah, the only the only accomplishment from that horrible, stupid waste of time was they got crisscross uh trending so there you go that's a throwback

that's just come on guys i i received five points in my point system for not commenting on this nonsense um good i forgot about your point system i got five points i almost gave them back because i saw one of the dumbest things i'd ever seen which is someone and i i guess i have to give the points back because i think this counts as a tweet, which is someone saying, I spoke to a doctor who told me that Trump is probably wearing a diaper and therefore has a form of mental decline, maybe fluid in the brain. And I wanted to make a couple points about this. One, all the best doctors do diagnose mental conditions based on pants. That's actually real. That's something that happens.

Two, very dangerous people can wear diapers and be incontinent. It's not a relief. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything. You can be a very powerful figure and have no control over your bladder or bowels. I love how you award yourself points for not tweeting things and then bring your rebuttals to like random Twitter accounts to the podcast heard by many, many more people. What's the buck? What's our swear jar? And also like specifically debunking each part of the tweet. And no, but no, there's, it's bullshit about, and then the other thing about it that pisses me off

and this happens all the time is Trump's in decline. Trump's in decline. I've fallen for it in the past. Why don't we do this? If God is going to take care of our Trump problem. Terrific. Let's not count on it. Let's do the part of humanity as we go and assume he's going to be perfectly healthy and cogent. Yeah, he was a little slow up there. He's been, he's had terrible nights at these awful rallies in the past. And inevitably everyone's like, that's it. It's the beginning of the end. The man is indefatigable in defense of his own ego. And we should just assume that going forward. No more decline bullshit. He's so eager to get back out there that he's doing a virtual event

with Diamond and Silk and Dinesh D'Souza, I think in Milwaukee or something. So yeah, he's full speed ahead. I thought you were going to mention that it was announced today, too. He's going on tour with Bill O'Reilly this summer to do a series of televised events. Who's opening up for Bill? Also, can I just point out real quick? I was gone for a week, right?

I was on the East Coast last week. I was like half checked out and not really paying attention to Twitter. And it's very funny how a week ago today, it was like a million people yelling at Maggie Haberman for propagating some lie about whether Trump is going to like resume office. And then a week later, it's like part of an NRSC video, which just speaks to the fact that there's no such thing as supporting pieces of the Trump agenda. There's no supporting Trump without embracing the entire election lie. It is completely a litmus test to be in his orbit or supported by him politically. It's like the core of who he is now. I mean, there is that brings up a point of the Maggie thing. Like there's been this debate about how much media coverage Trump should be getting these days, especially since

he's, you know, about to go back to holding rallies on Saturday night. MSNBC had commentators talking about the speech while it ran in the background. CNN and even Fox decided against running the speech at all. Of course, Newsmax and OAN ran the whole speech live. So did C-SPAN. Like, what do you guys where do you guys come down on this? Like how much Trump should be talked about in this post-presidential but pre-2024 phase? It's a good question.

I will say two things. One, look, we are critical of the media very often. There's this knee-jerk reaction to a lot of reporters who cover Trump and specifically Maggie Haverman and a few other women that are like, how dare you tell us what he said? And it's like, there's a famous moment in The Simpsons where they want to rip down the observatory so they don't find out about meteors heading to Earth. That's not a good thing to emulate. That is exactly right. But what I come down on this is the fact that Trump is speaking is not news and should not be presumed to be news. What matters is what he says. Is it different than what he said in the past? Does it go further in talking about a coup in the same way that Michael Flynn

speaking at a QAnon convention is not inherently news at this point because he has been radicalized and he will do that all the time. But when he says we should have a Myanmar style coup in the US, that's important. We should know that a former national security advisor said that. So I start from saying don't his speaking itself is no longer news and shouldn't be blanketed across the airwaves. But when he does say something that is important and unusual, he is a leading figure in our politics and it should be covered. And we should stop pretending otherwise because it hasn't helped. Yeah. I mean, look, he's the former president of the United States, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024 and the de facto, if not official, head of the Republican Party. So yeah, of course we

should cover him. That doesn't mean that CNN should live stream his podium like they were doing in 2016. But what is the recommendation here? That Maggie Haberman should mute the name Trump on Twitter or something? That's their job. They cover candidates. They report out things that are new or newsworthy. That's just how it is. And I think the sort of head in the sand approach to Trump is not going to work. And, you know, any more than like the cover every single utterance he made approach worked in 2015, right? We get to cover him like a normal candidate based on all the things we learned over the past four or five years. learned over the past four or five years. I would also add that there is a closed media ecosystem on the right. And Donald Trump is running for the, probably, is running for the Republican nomination. And so he will be able to communicate with his voters anytime he wants through the right-wing media system. If none of us ever mentioned Trump, if no mainstream news organization ever mentioned Trump for the next year, he would still have an open line of communication to the people who could make him the Republican nominee.

Just remember that we're in different silos here, people. It does not like us talking about him does not make it any more likely or less likely that he ends up as the Republican nominee. Yeah, the the don't amplify him scolds are a little a little frustrating. Did you see that Don Jr. is now on Cameo? I guess I did. How much I feel like it was a high price for a Don Jr. Cameo there. It's like four hundred, five hundred bucks or something like five hundred. Yeah, five hundred bucks.

But not not what a billionaire would charge. No, no, that's true. No. So I did think love it to your point about news or something different. Trump speeches like obviously he repeated the big lie. That's old by now. I do think it's useful to check on his speeches to hear where he and the Republican Party are going in terms of message. Like, what's the latest grievance?

Who's the latest villain? All that stuff. Axios ran a story headlined Trump's New Hillary on Friday, where a bunch of Trump advisors said that their top target will now be Dr. Fauci, who they somehow blame for the still unproven theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Sure enough, Trump delivered on Saturday night. Here's a clip. Dr. Fauci, who I actually got along with, he's a nice guy. He's a great promoter, you know. Not a great doctor, but he's a hell of a promoter. He likes television more than any politician in this room.

And they like television. more than any politician in this room. And they like television. But he's been wrong on almost every issue. And he was wrong on Wuhan and the lab also. Very wrong. Fauci said powerfully at the beginning, no masks.

You remember that? No, masks don't work. Masks don't work. And then he went into masks and then he became a radical masker. I would call it, if you have three, if you have four, get a pair of goggles also, ideally. The time has come for America and the world to demand reparations and accountability from the Communist Party of China. As a first step, all countries should collectively cancel any debt they owe to China as a down payment on reparations.

Tommy, why do you think they're going after Dr. Fauci now? What's the what's the conspiracy they're trying to sell? This is interesting. Yeah, I mean, I am a little confused by the strategy. No doubt there's a lot of people on the right who are enraged at Fauci. They blame him for covid, the lockdowns, like their kids hating them. But like overall, he is a pretty popular figure, more popular than most politicians by a lot. So Fauci is not going to be on the ballot. Knock on wood. Hopefully COVID won't be the focus of the election. So this seems a little dumb to me. So I think it's like two parts. One, Trump's not always strategic, right? Like it's all about grievances and fighting the last battle.

And this is the ongoing effort to spin the disastrous response to the coronavirus by Trump and his team. But two, they do seem to want to really kick up the lab leak theory and seem to view that as a panacea that allows them to get back into making this a fight about China with China, right? I mean, I can't imagine something that polls higher than like demanding reparations from the Chinese government over COVID-19. I do think the response for Democrats is actually pretty easy. I don't know whether or not this virus leaked from a lab. The WHO investigation was insufficient.

We should do everything we can to run it to ground to get all the answers we need from the Chinese and continue that until we get to the truth. That said, like the US response to COVID during Trump was inexcusable and a failure on any number of levels, no matter where the virus came from. Like, I think that you can handle this one. Yeah, I admit I'm confused about why anyone would be against like a full investigation into whether the lab leak theory is correct or not. Right. Like I realize there's a couple of different theories here. There's the theory that it might have leaked from the lab. The Trump and the Republicans and people on the right are

also spreading a conspiracy that it was bioengineered in the lab and then spread intentionally, of course. Then they're doing an extra connection where they're literally floating the idea that the NIH funded the creation of the virus because they made a grant to an organization that then made a separate smaller grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for monitoring bats. And so now it's like not only did the Chinese invent a bioweapon, but Dr. Fauci funded the Chinese bioweapon that then, you know, let loose COVID on the planet, which is really something. Lovett, what do you think about the politics of villainizing Fauci and China for COVID origins? I think Fauci got a lot of good press. Trump got a lot of bad press. It really pisses Trump off, right? Pissed him off. Like it was the same pandemic response. I'm the failure. He's the hero. I think it just bothers him. I do think it's a part of the big lie, which is the Democrats stole the election. They shut down the economy, which was my big

selling point based on a Democrat like Fauci spreading misinformation. And China caused it. So China causes it. The Democrats make it all worse. And then they steal the election. It's all part of the story. He's going to tell when he comes roaring back that, you know, we're going to hold the Chinese accountable for what they did to our country, which is going to be a big part of his campaign and has been in the past. So I don't think it needs to be more complicated than that. Yeah. And Joe Biden and his entire administration are in bed with the Chinese and they're helping to cover this up. And, you know, the Washington Post already reported that Trump's planning to make it a chief argument.

Republicans are trying to make it a centerpiece of their midterm election campaigns, pledging to hold congressional investigations if they win back the House majority. So you can already start to see Republicans win the House. They start holding investigations into the origins of COVID. They try to accuse Fauci of covering it up. But I mean, it's like a. But let's beat them to it. I don't... Hold our own investigation.

Look, I want to know where... Well, that is true. I want to know where it came from. If it came from a lab in China... Well, Tommy's response is the right one for Democrats. Which is what Joe Biden is saying, you know?

Yeah, of course. Yeah, look, right. I mean, the last we heard on this from Biden was basically he's not satisfied with the intelligence community's assessment or reporting on what happened.

And he's asked them to go back and look at all the evidence they have available to them and spend another 90 days or so to like get him a better answer. And then I think on top of that, like at the end of the day, this might be a question that is only answered by a bunch of scientists who figure out some way to sequence the DNA of the virus and some of the earlier cases and blah, blah, blah, nerd stuff that I don't understand. But hopefully we can get an answer that way. That's like back to the politics though. It's like, this is, you know, another approach strategy message that seems pretty fringe and seems pretty nutty to people like us. But you know, when you think about a base election, yeah, I mean, look, this could be the kind of thing that gets people pretty fired up, keeps them angry, keeps them motivated, keeps the conspiracy theories alive. Like, love it.

I thought you actually you stitched that all together pretty well and made me a little more unnerved about the whole thing than I was before. So thank you for that. Cool. So I'm here. message box this morning that, you know, the one way the one reason it might not work is because by the time you get to the midterms or even the presidential in 2024, COVID fades from memory and arguments about COVID don't really carry a lot of weight. But again, there's not a lot of logic to these conspiracies and how they take off and trying to like, you know, make everyone in the United States victims to China and throwing the Democrats

into the mix as allies of China instead of Americans is right in Trump's wheelhouse, right in the wheelhouse of grievance politics and everything that the Republican Party stands for now. So it does fit. And also one thing also is like when Democrats like the Democratic position will inevitably, I think, obviously will be less xenophobic and more complicated as it should be. But like when we see these issues, when we don't talk about these issues, like like one thing that Donald Trump has a, you know, a savant like ability to understand is like places where there's like real emotional resonance in the culture. You know, you've got John Cena recording hostage videos for referring to Taiwan as a country.

You have, you know, U.S. multinational corporations making movies, you know, catering to censors from other countries. That is chilling. There's a serious, serious challenge there. And Trump gets that. Republicans get that. they're going to go full xenophobic about it. What are we going to say? How, how do we talk about this? Um, and it's, and, and I do think it's important that we figure out how to talk about it. Before we get to love it's interview with Kara Swisher, I do want to talk about a really

interesting new democratic analysis about the 2020 election that, according to The New York Times, quote, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters unless it has a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left. all Democratic candidates to the far left. The 73-page report was commissioned by three Democratic groups, Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and Latino Victory Fund, which worked to elect Black and Hispanic candidates. It was written by two very talented Democratic operatives that we know, Marlon Marshall and Linda Tran,

who included nearly six months of data analysis and interviews with 143 Democratic lawmakers, candidates, and pollsters from key House and Senate races. So they basically come up with six main findings. I thought the first was the most relevant and something that we've talked a little bit about before, which is voters of color are persuasion voters who need to be convinced. Tommy, what did you think about that? Yeah, I mean, look, this section rang particularly true because I think we've heard this criticism before, which is to say that the Democratic Party too often takes votes from voters of color for granted. So more specifically, you know, the report talked about how the Democratic Party treats Latino voters like a monolith and doesn't account for regional or country of origin differences that might change how people vote. They also talked about how, you know, some campaigns, again, just assumed they would get support from Latino voters and didn't try to persuade them. They instead just focused on

turning them out, which means you could actually be turning out voters who are supporting your opponent, which is extremely foolish. It talked about the rapid growth in the number of AAPI voters in the US and how they're becoming a really powerful voting bloc. But some congressional candidates in California in particular could have actually won their races if they'd just done a better job reaching out to and persuading AAPI voters, specifically, I think it was Vietnamese and Filipino voters here in California. And then they also talked about how generally campaigns were not doing enough messaging research with communities of color. That means like larger polling samples of Latino voters in polls. That means canvassing and focus groups to help candidates figure out, okay, what issues do

these communities care about? How do we reach them? What messages are the most persuasive? And it also confirmed that a lot of communities of color were most often targeted with disinformation and that Democrats failed to respond effectively because one, they often didn't know it was happening. And two, we weren't knocking on doors, which is the most effective way to rebut some of this stuff. And so, you know, it was a very interesting, I thought, thoughtful report and well done, especially this section. Love it. What was your reaction to that first finding? to that first finding? So this builds on something we understood, which is that our victories were based on huge turnout, but then lower proportional votes among the communities we turned out, right? That was sort of true across the board. And what I don't totally understand in looking at

this, and I agree with everything Tommy just said in describing it. And there's a lot of ways to act upon this information. But there's a part of this that's a little bit hard to understand, which is, OK, so let's say we wanted to turn out 19 year old white women. Right. That was the group we were targeting. Well, we would assume that 19 year old white women that participated in the past and that will participate in this election are likely to vote for a Democrat because that's what they've done in the past. So we start turning them out. We start trying to get more and more 19-year-old white women to vote. Well, as you go deeper and deeper into that pool of people, you start reaching people that maybe haven't voted in the past that are maybe less engaged. And all of a sudden, they look a little

bit less like the group that has been participating all the time. So it's some piece of this, like when you drive turnout to new heights, you end up pulling in a more heterodox sample, maybe inevitably as you do that. And so what I don't understand in looking at this is how do you deal with the fact that part of this will always be inevitable? And how do you think about that distinction turning out more voters? But that but that bigger pool of voters doesn't look as democratic as before, because sometimes that'll deliver you the White House. of voters doesn't look as democratic as before, because sometimes that'll deliver you the White House. So I think I think what happens here is this is an oversimplification. But right now, starting at the beginning of a race, campaigns spend a lot of money trying to persuade white swing voters, usually through targeted advertising and direct voter contact.

And then at the end of the race, usually the last few weeks, they spend money trying to get out the vote in communities of color, assuming that those voters already agree with us. And basically, all this is saying is like, we should treat voters of color like we treat white swing voters, invest early in persuasion through advertising and direct voter contact. And the other interesting thing is that's basically what happened in Georgia. And that's why you saw a higher turnout and better margins among all voters of color, not just black voters, than you saw in some other swing spit date. So there's this, you know, we've talked a million times about how the Latino vote share for Democrats went down. Well, it went down by

less in Georgia than any other state. Why? Because organizers in Georgia were on the ground early. They invested early in communities of color. They invested in voter contact early. And so it's just, I mean, you can go into all the details, but the basic assumption has to be that voters of color are just not automatically with us and they're not automatically progressive. White progressive activists wouldn't think that about all white voters. So why do we think that about all black voters and all Latino voters and all Asian-American voters? Why do you assume that new voters are trying to turn out look like voters that have been turning out for years? Why do you assume they have the same assumptions?

You should never assume that. That to me is that that to me is what ties those things together. Yeah, I mean, don't assume anything. Their their final, you know, they wrote a little note at the end from the authors themselves with recommendations. And the final recommendation basically is get rid of the distinction between persuasion and GOTV canvassing. Like campaigns too often do persuasion early.

And then at some point, like the campaign manager is like, OK, it's GOTV time. They say just erase that distinction. Make every interaction with voters about persuasion and about turnout. It's a both and approach. Let's stop with this, you know, sort of like silly distinction, which, you know, the impact is you end up knocking on different lists, right? You go to different doors, you're spending money in different places, and they want to just say, stop that. I think it's the most important, you know, recommendation from the whole report. I thought the other most actionable finding was number two, which they found that Republican attempts to brand Democrats as radicals worked. It didn't work against Joe

Biden at the top of the ticket, as well as it did with Senate candidates, as well as it did with House candidates. What do you think about their arguments about this? And what can we do about it next time, Tommy? Yeah, I mean, so like they were pretty clear that they found that this overall framework of calling Democrats radical was effective in some races. You know, that that frame includes, you know, claims that Democratic candidates want to defund the police, that they're socialists, that they are just Pelosi stooges. Right? They didn't try to unpack which of those messages were the most salient because it's case by case and the effectiveness of the attack often depends on how well or how poorly you respond to it. They did note a couple

things, which was that heavy law and order messaging from Republicans correlated with higher Republican shares of the vote among Latino, AAPI, and Black voters. And they found that it was particularly hard for candidates of color to rebut attacks that inaccurately accused them of wanting to defund the police. The lesson they drew from that was these law and order attacks are, they're not new. They're really part of a long line of racist dog whistle messages that we've heard forever. So again, their recommendation was, we need to take these attacks head on. We should not shy away from hard conversations about race. We need to reimagine the Democratic Party's economic message as being for all working

people and commit to long-term organizing, like in Georgia, and invest more money in that organizing earlier. Georgia and invest more money in that organizing earlier. And then, you know, sort of generally when it comes to questions of racial justice or, you know, policing, like do a better job of painting a picture of what Democrats are for and the policies that we're pushing for and not just sort of be gone the defensive and putting up ads in response to Republican attacks. I think we should get ahead of it all. Well, but what did you think if you were like a Democratic campaign trying to figure out how to rebut what they called in this the Dem-Po-Pourri attack, which includes socialism, Medicare for all, Green New Deal, Pelosi, AOC squad, defund the police. They sort of it was interesting that

they said that all of those attacks sort of together had an effect and it wasn't just one attack specifically. It was sort of a potpourri as they said so here's here's what here's my reaction so one thing they noted is that uh you could get ahead of it by having a positive message early uh both in terms of what your campaigns before but also your bio but there was an ability to kind of get ahead of it with your own bio now they point to people like mark kelly and it would be nice if all of our candidates are have the most compelling story a human being fucking possibly have been to space we gotta run a bunch of astronauts yeah astronauts win elections all right astronauts in 2022 love astronauts you can hard to get me to vote again an astronaut

astronaut uh other than jeff bill nelson bill nelson did lose in 2018 though but it but it worked for a while he was kind of a nut the uh he think he's the nasa administrator now and a great job he's doing i didn't know that i didn't know that i didn't know because i saw it i was like wait they put bill nelson in charge of nasa um cut this now keep it who cares um love you bill just kidding just kidding uh what are we talking about oh yeah so getting ahead of it here's the one thing I did also take away from this, which is like there was that incredibly unhelpful

round of debate where some of the Democratic moderates blamed the squad for some of their misfortune. And I understand that impulse, but I think it's like we need to stop. Like Republicans

have a machine here. They will find somebody to use some argument, some way of making you a socialist. You would defund the police person no matter what you say. You actually have some agency, according to this report, to deal with it. Right. Like we just you know, you talked about this on Thursday about that special election. They accused Stansberry of wanting to defund the police, but she did ads showing that she was not against reform, but also had this record on law enforcement. Right. So like there's ways to respond. And I think the kind of circle fire squad, what's that called? Circular firing squad.

Circular firing squad. Circular firing squad, I think, is not to be confused with the squad, the squad. No, no. Different squad. Different squad. But that that is not particularly helpful. Like, don't blame like there will the activists, the left, they're going to say what they're going to say. That is not your problem. Your problem is the way that that information is manipulated by the right and what you're going to do to respond to it in your own campaign. Well, you're never going to be able to stop it for the end of time, right? Like there are always going to be activists who go out there and say what they believe. And not only should we not try to silence them, no one's going to be able to. Right. Even if you wanted to.

Right. They're always going to be out there saying what they want. And so you have to figure out a way to deal with this. I did think it was most interesting that like the earlier you go on TV with bio spots about who you are, the more voters are going to know you and then when you try to rebut these attacks, they will trust you rebutting the attacks because they feel like they know you better and that you're not some just new candidate that they can't trust. Yeah.

And the report also like spoke to the need. Look, one of the one of the findings was basically it was a weird year because of covid. Right. Like, no shit. Yeah. But, you know, how you responded to that weird year actually materially impacted how well you did. So they talked about how Antonio Delgado, who's a member of Congress in New York, had his field team shift to basically a constituent service message in their field campaign rather than just asking for their votes. And that was an interesting way to sort of make it feel more meaningful people. It also talked about how in the midst of the pandemic, just an anti-Trump message really was hurting. There was a lack of

economic message or agenda, especially when Democrats were painted as pro-lockdown and people maybe began to blame the Democratic Party in part for losing their jobs or being home or their kids being out of school. And then just it seems like not resuming canvassing was a real problem that was felt not just in the presidential campaign and in our ability to understand what voters were thinking, but also in these down ballot races. So that's a good lesson learned. Not being able to drive a consistent economic message has been a challenge of the Democratic Party for years. And like, here's two Democratic candidates from sort of different ends of the spectrum that were able to do it. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, right? Like Joe Biden's is a little more to the center than

Bernie's, but like at least they were both able to drive an economic message. And I think it, you know, like I just think Democrats have to, it's hard because an economic message doesn't break through as much sometimes that, you know, the media tends to cover other flashpoints, but it's clearly important with working class voters, white, black, brown. Right. With everyone. And the ability to drive that message, I think, is key to success in the future. Yeah. I'll also say, though, that like Bernie had a incredibly consistent, obviously, economic message at the core of his campaign. I'm not saying Biden didn't have an economic message, but the situation in the country was the economic message. You know, like that was a unique circumstance. And I think looking at some of the down ballot losses, it's interesting, right?

Because I found this, I didn't realize how few it was that only 15 federal offices had split ticket voting. That basically Biden did have coattails. They just weren't enough where we needed them to flip legislatures and win more seats in the Senate. But it is true that like a lot of this is a fight over kind of in the same way candidates can rebut disinformation by getting up with bio spots earlier, like the Democratic Party needs their version of that. A set of core principles, values that we kind of use over and over again, go back to over

and over again, because we've talked about this in the past that like we're not going to be able to respond and rebut misinformation coming at us from all directions with facts like that just doesn't work. That doesn't do anything. But if we start with a baseline set of values, set of core truths that people recognize as being central to the party, then there's a hope that you can do a better job of overcoming that, especially when we've seen Medicare, Medicaid expansion, voting rights, legalizing marijuana, like all of these pro-union bills passing in red states across the country. Well, I would suggest that everyone go read the report. We'll put a link to it in the show notes.

It's very interesting. And when we come back, we will have Lovett's interview with Kara Swisher Joining us on the pod she is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and the host of the paper's podcast Sway. She is also the co-host of the podcast Pivot Please welcome back,

Kara Swisher. Kara, good to see you. Good to see you. All right. So we had some big news. Word got out late last week that Facebook was going to make a big announcement affecting Donald Trump's place on the platform. They announced that Trump would be suspended for two years, starting from January 7th, a fitting day, the day after the insurrection. I think that's actually quite notable. And that in time, they will evaluate whether or not the threat has receded. What led to this decision and what was your reaction to it? Well, you know, they've been kicking this can down the road forever, right? They've been trying, they've been sort of indulging him for the past five years or four years or whatever,

from way back, way back before he was president. And so he's been sort of allowed to misbehave the entire time and continues to escalate it up until and including January 7th, when he really, his posts were rather dangerous and they inflamed people and incited violence, among other things. He gave a speech too, there were other things, but the way he behaved on social media certainly didn't help the situation, as they say. And so, and he kept posting his speeches. And when he posted several of his speeches, they were problematic because they were sort of egging people on. That's what, it was under the determination. And so he finally, after, after violating their rules quite a lot, they kicked him off, you know, and that was that.

He just violated their rules one too many times. And so then they decided then to sort of kick it. What they did is they gave Facebook Twitter permanently banned Trump, you know, just forget it. That's enough. We've had enough. And and which they should have done much earlier. Lots of people could see where this was going. And and then YouTube, he's still sort of in limbo there a little bit. But Facebook did this weird thing called indefinitely ban, which is like, I didn't like either. You can't indefinitely jail someone. You can't, you know, it was just weird. And what it was, was they didn't want to make a decision in any direction whatsoever.

So they didn't piss off anyone, but they ended up pissing off everybody. And so then they kicked it over to the Facebook board, which is a board of an independent board that is paid for by facebook and was was selected by facebook of 20 people it's supposed to be 40 around the globe and they kicked it over to that group which which it is independent it's not but it isn't like you know what i mean it's hard to be independent when it's paid paid and picked by facebook but isn't it a trust ours isn't it now paid for by some kind of a trust? It is. It's just the origins are problematic, no matter how they slice it. You know, and I have called I have, I have called them a UN, but 100% less effective, like, how can they deal with this thing? But this is a

very good people on this board. Not enough critics, but that's okay. And so what they did, which I thought was pretty terrific, is they pointed out the obvious, which a lot of us have pointed out is you have no rules. And you're we're not ruling it on it for you. You don't have any policies. And in fact, the policy you kept pointing to about newsworthiness doesn't even exist. And so it was crazy. I was like, yeah, yeah. Like, why don't you do it?

So they kicked it back to Zuckerberg and said, you figure it out. This is your problem. You created it. You have to, we're not going to solve it for you. And then later, if we don't agree with your policy, we'll talk about that. But you're the ones that have to make the policy, not us. And so they kicked it back to them. And now this was the decision, which is sort of a half measure, which is two years.

We'll see how he does. And then we'll evaluate it then. And I think they're hoping something will happen in the two-year interim. I don't know what, they don't have to make a decision, whether he like whatever happens to him. And so in two years, they'll decide if he continues to be a problem or if the, if the public discourse is so inflamed by Trumpism that, and the, and the sort of mini, you know, you know, the thousand duck-sized Trumps are around like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And what's interesting is there was a story in the New York Times today showing that the minute they kicked him off, there was definitely a decline in people being inflamed. But then all these other things keep amplifying him. So it's the same difference. That's what I was going to ask you about next, actually. amplifying him. So it's the same difference. That's what I was going to ask you about next, actually. So because, you know, Facebook and our, we all do this, we're doing this. Trump has an ability to make us do this. We focus on this individual to the detriment of the systems and processes taking place all around them. The point that you make is, yes, the Times today has

this great analysis. They use some information from the Global Disinformation Index, and they found that on a host of issues. Yeah, Trump is gone. Trump is doesn't have the reach he once did. But his words are promoted. His ideas are promoted in some cases to the same degree, except on issues of election disinformation, because the platforms had other rules, irrespective of Trump as one person that prevented that information from being spread. And it sort of goes to the systemic problems that Facebook still is not willing to address. Right. Right. And I think that's the problem is that this is the die is already cast here. And the people who run these systems, not the not the Facebook people, people

who use them know how to manipulate them and move them around. You don't have to have now look at Donald Trump tweet. Good for cable discussion. Good for this. Good for that. The plug thing that he didn't work out like nobody was like rushing to report it. They're just like, oh, he said this crazy thing, but it didn't have the same impact, right. Or the same urgency. And he didn't have the global platform of the White House, which is another thing. You can walk downstairs and say whatever he wants. And so there is some, it not coming from him and his speech was kind of like, it's kind of flopped. And, you know, it didn't get the same kind of pickup

like the, oh, wow, pickup. And then everything was focused on his pants, which was a lie, which is, you know, whether he's wearing his pants on, that was a fake photo shoot, whatever that was. So it was, it didn't, he doesn't have the same ability to generate attention to himself, but it doesn't didn't he doesn't have the same ability to generate attention to himself, but it doesn't mean his ideas don't get out there. And so that the systems in place to

for for amplification of bad things. And that's one of the big issues, obviously, because of the size of these platforms. So so there are two other pieces of this decision that actually have, I think, larger implications. One is around this completely gauzy, cloudy idea, foggy idea of newsworthiness as an exception for honesty or, you know, the rules of their platform. And they're going to keep that but apply to everybody. It's a bit confusing. But the bigger decision was saying that they're going to treat politicians like they treat any old user. That seems good. That seems like a really positive change. When what would you make of it? Well, he Mark was very particular, like we want that speech he gave. I happen to be at that speech

at Georgetown where he talked about that. Let's have the politicians speak. It's more important to have them speak than to police what they're saying, especially if it's bad, you know, to have them speak than to police what they're saying, especially if it's bad, you know, including if it's bad. And I was there and he was sort of describing a state of free speech in the First Amendment that didn't exist. You know what I mean? Like, I was like, why can they violate platform rules that you have for everybody else?

Why can't everybody else say it then? And it had no, it had no, you know, like, I literally almost jumped up from the audience and started yelling at him. Like, go take a history course. I, here at Georgetown, where I went, like, you can learn. Here's a law class. Here's a this class. And so they, you know, what's interesting about them is that they change their tune all the time. Like they change, they, this is the way it is. And then this is the way it is. And one of the things that drives me crazy is a couple of years ago, I had this famous interview where he talked about Holocaust deniers and we're going to keep them on the platform. And then two years later, no,

they're terrible. And then, you know, people can change their minds, but the damage in the interim, same thing with Alex Jones. No, Kara, we're not taking them off. Oh, you will. Oh, you will. Cause he keeps violating your rules and eventually you're going to have to, then they take them off. Same thing here. Like I'm glad they did it, but it was like way too late. And I hate to be like, well, too little too late, but that's really what it feels like in a lot of ways. And it's not enough either. It's not a, they don't want to, they want to sort of stutter step their way into this while huge amounts of damage is happening all over the place. And that's my problem with it. Yeah, it does seem, you know, you talked about this in your piece. You said that Mark Zuckerberg is naive. And I found that interesting.

I didn't use the word naive. The headline was. But go ahead. I think it's a jump. I think it's a jump. But go ahead. Okay. Well, I would say the headline was fair. A fair description of what you said in the piece, which is basically has this sort of like college dorm room idea of how speech works, right? Well, if a politician lies, people should see the lie so that they know that they're a liar as if people are these great adjudicators of fact because they have access to some other body of information. Sure. And that Trump took advantage of that. But it does seem like that reluctance that he has is

like infused in everything that Facebook does, including this decision. You have Nick Clegg, the spokesperson for Facebook, basically saying how, oh, you know, we can't please everybody. This is a problem from both sides. Yeah. And then he says, well, and now we're waiting for really it shouldn't be up to Facebook. It should be up to government. He's just sort of like, you know, it's a very like almost like S&M thing, like like bind us, bind us, dad, but daddy, you know, the government has the First Amendment like they can't. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any. Of course, it doesn't. Nick Clegg is highly paid to not make sense for a lot of things that I like Nick Clegg. And I think

he's very smart. He did call me that commentator on TV this week. That commentator, that one, that one. And it always is. But, you know, it's kind of irritating to have them try to play games. It's like, look, it's look, was taking Donald Trump off was the correct thing to do. You can scream censorship all you want, but he broke the rules. And in any other business, if he did broke the rules the way he broke the rules here, if he kept crashing his car drunkenly into people, he would be taken off the road. If he kept if he ran into a restaurant and peed in people's soup, he'd be not allowed to go into restaurants and he'd be arrested. This is like we all if he walked around naked, God forbid, he'd be arrested. Like we all follow rules all the time.

And for some reason, the idea that he has the God given right to be on Facebook is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. That said, we can have a big discussion about the fact that there's one major social platform and it's too big. And it shouldn't be the one to decide the fate of the American president. That is a really good debate to have. It's separate from this other debate. and it's about size and scope and power. And that's, there's two things going on here. Did Donald Trump break the rules of Facebook and Twitter badly over and over and over again? Did he, you know, it was interesting, the Times used the word desecrate their rules. I had piss on and then kicked. Like, that's what he did. He pissed on them, then he kicked them, and then he kicked them again for good measure. And he gets kicked off for that. That's a separate argument. And then what do we do about the fact that these companies are so big and powerful

that they become public utilities? Should we designate them public utilities, which is what Clarence Thomas was sort of arguing? I don't know. We should talk about it. Maybe, maybe not. I don't agree with that, but we certainly should have a cogent

debate about their power at the same time and separate the two. Yeah, no, it's interesting though. You said two things. You said size and you said scope. And it's actually, I think there's an important distinction there because in some sense, social networks depend on size, right? Like a social network is only as good as the base of users that it's had. There's a network effect, like one of these things takes off, kills the rest, it's had. There's a network effect, right? One of these things takes off, kills the rest. RIP MySpace, RIP Friendster, right? So in some sense, there's an inherent monopolistic part of social networking that they're only

as useful as the size of how many people they reach. And then you talked about scope, right? Facebook gobbles up WhatsApp. It gobbles up Instagram. It copies Snapchat. It does all of these things. How do you make that distinction, right? Like, I want these companies to be less powerful, but I also recognize that social networks that reach everybody are valuable. That's part of

their value. They are. There's a lot of things you could do. There's interoperability, the Facebook shares information that there could be new companies that talk to each other, right? That there's all kinds of ways to do this. But you're right, these social networks benefit by being larger, and they're more useful by being larger. And as they suck up everything, they get to be the arbiters of truth, which Mark never wanted to be, but that's what, you know, I always think he said, in that speech, he said, I don't want to be an arbiter of truth. And I'm like, then why did you build a platform that forced it to needing one? You need one here. And even if your truth is different than

other people's, this is what this platform requires. And so when it comes down to it, you have to build, you have to, you know, we're smart people. We can figure out how to make these networks so that there could be many more companies like this that can interoperate with each other. You know, texts now, remember when text didn't interoperate with each other? When you were only on the Apple text or on this text? They figured it out. Right. And so how can we create social networks? So there's all kinds of social networks where you see, you know, where you can look at things and belong to things and yet move. There's I don't know, or make it a public utility and then the government can step in and regulate it more.

I still think the government will never be able to regulate speech on any of these platforms. Never. more. I still think the government will never be able to regulate speech on any of these platforms. Never. No, I think, you know, it has all the same challenges that Facebook is facing when it is basically a quasi government entity at this point, plus a whole host of others that are far more dangerous because it's the government and they have tanks. Yeah. And one of the things that drives me crazy, the last thing is the right, the right, like the one from Louisiana, the Senator, she was going on and on about it being a free speech question. And if it's not, if it's Trump today, it's you tomorrow. And what's incredible is the lack of understanding about the First Amendment. No, it's not. If you do something like Trump did, which is incite

violence, yes, it will be you tomorrow. Getting, you know, the whole anti-cancel culture crowd, I appreciate a lot of some of the stuff that people talk about cancel culture, but in some ways it's got, it's ridiculously out of hand in that if people violate rules, guess what? You get, you get arrested. You just do. And that's, that's really one of the things. And to conflate it with free speech is another thing. And conflate it with the ability of people to be heard is, is a wholly different argument and mashing them together creates a real problem for all of us because you have to separate them. It's, you know, Mark Zuckerberg saying, I don't want to be an arbiter of truth yet burying within the options, the ability to see posts as they happen, right? Like there is, it's really, it's, I don't want to be seen as the arbiter of

truth, or I don't want to be held accountable as an arbiter of truth. You know, Dan Pfeiffer pointed this out on Pod Save America last week, which is, you know, Donald Trump just shut down his blog because he didn't like it being made fun of because nobody was going to it. Here is this figure, this larger than life political figure, leader of the Republican Party, dominated social media, dominated Twitter,

dominated Facebook. Absent the automatic algorithm-based sharing of his content, it foundered. And that tells you something. Yep. He's good. Twitter's good for him. He needs to be on Twitter.

That's what it tells me. I wrote that column. I said, without Twitter, he's nothing. He doesn't have anywhere to go. Even Facebook isn't good enough because he can't like do as much damage there. And so I think three years ago, I'm like, if he gets kicked off Twitter, that's the end of this for this part. That said, I still think he has enormous influence because there's all these polling, you know.

Of course, the support among Republicans of Donald Trump is quite strong. And that's all that matters in the end, not whether he has a million zillion social media followers. It's what he can do to them, what he can what his influence can do to them with the voters. And that's why you have all these relatively reasonable people mouthing this endless bullshit. They're just looking at those polls and they're seeing a lot of support for Donald Trump. And until that ends, they will continue to make, to do any kind of pretzel around him.

And then the crazies will stick with them no matter what. So that's what they do. Like the Marjorie Taylor greens are just going to go on to the bitter end. And, you know, we have QAnon conferences. And so, and as we started, it will be a bitter end for them. You know, one hopes, um, or us, uh, or someone, the end, there will be bitterness and there will be an end, but, uh, yeah. And just to, just to go back to where we started, it's not just about removing a person. It's about, it's about removing the systems of spreading misinformation, which mattered far more than just deplatforming individuals.

You have to actually have a system in place for saying, hey, this is beyond the pale. This doesn't exist here. And I hope what Facebook and Twitter learn from this is that if you don't enforce your rules, you will pay double later. If you wait, you will pay double later. One last question for you, Cara. Jeff Bezos is going to space. What should we do while he's gone? And do you think it's at all odd that this will be the first time in his career as an Amazon employee he will be

peeing into a container? Someone was putting that on Twitter. He can wear diapers like his employees. Someone was putting that on Twitter. He can wear diapers like his employees. I do want to comment on that. I think it's a funny tweet. You know, he's he really is a geek. He's he was always sort of a Star Trek fan, particularly Star Trek. And I think has always wanted to do this, you know, wanted to go into space. He has. It's something he's talked about. He likes the outfits. Same thing. I think Richard Branson's heading there. And of course, Elon has, it's something he's talked about. He likes the outfits. Same thing. I think Richard Branson's heading there.

And of course Elon hasn't told us when he's going yet. So it's kind of an interesting lost in space moment. It would be interesting if he got lost in space. Like if like that was like a plot, you know, you could have like a movie. It's it's, it's, it's like there's this like midlife crisis billionaire escalation. It's like he's I applaud him for that. Like, it's not just sex, not a yacht. It's not.

No, but he liked it. And then he like got an outfit. He got an outfit. He changed his body. He like, you know, he may have a yacht. I'm sure he has a yacht. You know, he did the whole nine years. And now it's space.

I'm like, OK, all right. You know what? Maybe maybe if you go far enough go far enough into space, Jeff, you'll be popular in high school. It's possible. It's possible. I don't think he wasn't popular. I don't think that's what he suffers from.

I don't think that's his. I think many people in tech possibly suffer from that, although it's kind of a trope. But he's a character. Let's just say he's a character I think I wonder what Elon Musk is thinking today because they don't like each other that seems to be obvious well we always

wonder what Elon Musk is thinking I want Elon in space I think that'll be that'll just be fantastic like what does he do up there like who knows what he'll do I know he can be so amusing sometimes he says terrible things but um and he does a lot that does that a lot but um uh but i i want to see i want to see them both i have an idea for a tv series where they both end up on mars like by themselves like and they

can't get back and they're together in like one of those matt damon huts and they have to grow potatoes together that's what i want to see. I'm into it. I'm into it. That's a great idea. Let's get that made. Look, I've said this on this show before, but if you do pitch an idea on a podcast,

technically Netflix owns the right. So we should just be really careful. I already have whatever did copyrighted it. Anyway, Kara Swisher. Always good to see you. Okay. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right. Bye. Thanks to Kara for joining us today. And we'll talk to you soon. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support.

And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.